ACKL: The Albion Chicken Kickin' League
by Rustito
Summary: Learn the story behind Albion's short-lived sports league dedicated to the classy, competitive world of Chicken Kickin'.


DISCLAIMER – I do not own any Fable characters, settings, etc. that are property of and copyrighted by Lionhead Studios. Alterations to the Fable universe are not to be considered canon.

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ACKL: The Albion Chicken Kickin' League  
An overview by Rusty Dillingham

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_(This is written in a style much like the analysis of a book in the Fable games is written. Consider that you've just acquired this book in the game and you're partaking in its sinful, sarcastic pleasures.)_

This book titled "The True Story of the ACKL," authored by not-at-all-famous historian Arthur Loveshiswaffles, has not seen use in some time. It appears to have been sitting on the Bowerstone book store's shelf for quite a long period, nestled tightly between "Happiness: A Shortsighted Dummy's Guide to Divorce" and "The Adventures of Bob the Horny Beggar."

The book chronicles the utterly hopeless, failed attempt at a full-fledged sports league dedicated to the somewhat-exciting world of Chicken Kickin'. The league was spearheaded by bored Bowerstone noble Edward Eggington, who had grown supremely tired of watching people get their lungs ripped out in the Crucible (contrary to what one might be lead to believe, when you've seen a man get flicked across a room by a rock troll's finger more than a hundred times, it does get a little old), and he had run out of ways to flaunt his wealth and waste his money on idiotic things no one with half a brain would ever consider worth buying. He desired action in his drab life, and thus set out to create a sports league that would tour across Albion so people wouldn't have to risk being attacked by Balverines and, more importantly, wear out their shoes walking all the way to Westcliff to see some kind of competition.

With the help of three friends (who thankfully had some passing knowledge of how to manage a business endeavor, as one of them had spent five years in Knothole Glade trying to sell animals that had been stepped on by various other, larger animals), Eggington set to work on figuring out how to get the league going. The first issue was to figure out what kind of competition the league would be centered around. Eggington, who was financing the endeavor, argued that while the Crucible was a fine display of somewhat-sportsmanlike chaos in its own right, they should try to pick a sport that hadn't already been done, so to speak--so as to give the people of Albion something different.

As the men tried to come up with ideas for a new sport, there were various suggestions, most of which were embarrassingly terrible. Gaylord Stein, for example, suggested some type of competition that perhaps involved a man hitting a ball with a stick, and then running to what he called a "base." His suggestion was met with enthusiastic ridicule, but H.L. Huffinpuff topped it by suggesting a sport where one kicks a ball around with one's feet and tries to get it into a "goal" without using his hands or arms. Eggington was appalled and told Huffinpuff that no one in their right mind would ever want to play or watch something so humiliatingly stupid. They wanted a sport the entire world would enjoy, not something the entire world would laugh at.

Big Fat Joe mentioned that a few days before, he had once kicked a noisy chicken to shut it up, and that in doing so he had rather enjoyed himself, so he'd done it again for the sole purpose of seeing how far the feathery fellow flew, after which he had done it again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again. The men considered this, liked the idea, and after many hours of intense, deep deliberation, had their sport: Kick a chicken as hard as you can and if you kick it the furthest, you win.

With their brilliant idea in hand, the founders went to Bowerstone Market to hype their new sport and con-- recruit potential athletes into the new league. All sports needed athletes, after all.

"Fame and fortune will be yours!" they proffered to anyone who would listen, which ended up being very few people at all. "Fame and fortune! You know you love fame, fortune, and all the fine little things that come with fame and fortune! Come on! Fame! Fortune! Come on! Hello? F-A-M-E! All that! Damn it, are you people deaf? Don't you want fame and fortune? What? Oh, that's just rude. I-- you come back here and say that, you sniveling--" And so on--at least until they were asked by the sheriff to keep it down, or they'd be fined for disturbing the peace.

In the end, only four people were stupid enough to join up with the league. The first to be employed was a powerful, well-toned adventurer named Griff McBride. He claimed to have just returned from a hard bit of adventuring, and was always looking out for more adventure. Adventure was his middle name. People loved adventurers. People loved adventurous men. Adventure, adventure, adventure. McBride asked Gaylord Stein if he liked adventurers. Stein replied that he had never really considered it before. McBride said he would like to take him on an adventure sometime, much to Stein's disturbed confusion.

The second to join was a not-very-attractive-at-all young woman called Kathleen Korpulent. She seemed only interested in joining because of McBride's presence, despite McBride being utterly oblivious to her for almost the entirety of the league's existence. The founders liked the idea of having a woman on the tour, although none of them would have even considered touching her with a forty-foot pole.

The third to sign up was Speedy, the local carriage horse. No one really knows how Speedy got signed up, or if he managed to do it himself in the first place. The founders checked their roster at one point during the sign-up process, and Speedy's name was on it, and he was standing there eating Big Fat Joe's big fat hat. They could find no fault with having him on the tour (actions regarding unfair employment discrimination was an increasing problem throughout Albion), though there was some discussion about who was to clean up after him when a very obvious problem made itself apparent. Big Fat Joe got the short end of that deal.

Last and most certainly least to join was a poor little idiot by the creative name of Bandit. Bandit claimed to be a bandit, and was obsessed with the idea of being a mysterious, mask-wearing, notorious, trouble-causing bandit, though in practice he needed a lot of work.

Some time back, he had been staying at the Bowerstone inn, and, he had snuck out of his room in the middle of the night to go sneaking, because that's what bandits did. He broke into a room and stole everything of the owner's, then went out and snuck around some more. When he returned to his room he found everything he owned had been stolen, and he immediately reported it to a guard. The guard came and inspected the room, only to find all the stolen property in Bandit's possession because he had robbed his own room. So Bandit got locked up in the Bowerstone jail for a few days for stealing his own stuff. It was really rather pitiful, the guards felt. They were kind of embarrassed about it.

It wasn't the finest array of athletes ever assembled, and McBride looked like the only one competent enough to kick a chicken and not kill himself or someone else doing it, but Eggington and the other league founders were mind-numbingly confident in their new employees' chicken kickin' abilities. After some obligatory marketing that involved Huffinpuff screaming at the top of his lungs to the entire town about the league, it was decided: The first game of the Albion Chicken Kickin' League's inaugural season would be held at Oakfield, the next in Westcliff, and the final right there in the heart of Bowerstone. Not the longest season by any stretch of the imagination, but they were just getting started.

The journey to Oakfield was the first sign of potential problems for the tour. Kathleen Korpulent fell off a cliff three times, and each time it happened the others failed to help her because they were laughing too hard about how she looked like a boulder rolling down a hill. Additionally, Big Fat Joe sold Speedy to a wandering merchant for a will potion, despite having no working knowledge of will powers himself, and the group spent the better part of a day reversing the deal.

Worse yet was that when they set up camp one night, it became evident that Bandit had certain tendencies while sleeping. McBride would later describe the phenomenon as "the kind of sound a banshee and salsa singer make while doing the nasty with each other." Rolling around in his sleeping bag and grinding his teeth so loudly the rest of the group swore they were breaking out of his head, Bandit would frequently alert others as to what kind of interesting dream he might be having with statements ranging from anything between "AWOOOOOOOOOYIYIYIYIYI" to "MOOOOOOOOWAAAYAYAYAYA." This would go on throughout the entire night, and it would continue throughout the tour, with all others displaying fine efforts to keep from murdering the little weirdo.

Later, the entourage was attacked by bandits, who fired flintlock rifles down at them from a higher elevation. While the others were pinned down and likely soiling themselves, McBride and Bandit hurried to the rescue. This was a spectacular failure in its own right because it turned out McBride was the single worst shot with a pistol in the entire universe (at one point he almost shot Eggington), and Bandit ran off into the woods to find a way up to where the other outlaws were, waving his rusty cutlass and screaming like a psycho the entire time. Eventually the enemy bandits got bored and left, though it took the entourage two days to realize this, after which they had to go find Bandit, who'd gotten himself lost in the woods and had since been taken in by a family of squirrels.

When they finally reached Oakfield, another problem presented itself, in that none of them actually had any chickens to kick. Eggington, with his wallet in tow, set out to remedy this issue by offering to buy a local farmer's entire stock of chickens.

The farmer would have none of this, as he was far too attached to his flock to see them used for something as self-righteous and unsightly as human competition. Incensed, Eggington argued with him for at least two hours straight, claiming chickens were good for nothing but getting fat, being eaten, and kicking the crap out of. Unbeknownst to many, this farmer would later go on to found PETA, much to Albion's disgust.

Since his stuffy opulence had failed him, Eggington decided to dispense with the nobilities and play rough. He demanded that Bandit go and steal some of the farmer's chickens, lest they have to play Chicken Kickin' with something else, like a ball (this possibility was met with horror by everyone). Bandit made his attempt late that night, and proudly returned with the farmer's infant son. Eggington took a few minutes to explain what a chicken looked like. A second attempt brought back the farmer's wife. Only when McBride went with him in order to point out what was a chicken and what wasn't did Bandit succeed in his task.

The following morning, the first game took place in front of the Sandgoose Tavern. A massive crowd of three people came to witness the event, as the ticket price of one gold piece was far too high for most Oakfielders to pay, despite Huffinpuff's best efforts to market the sport around town. While the first-ever ACKL game got started, most everyone else in Oakfield were busy tending farms, getting drunk, or wondering where their chickens were. The Official Game Chicken was placed on the ground, and everyone was ready to go.

McBride was the first to give it a whirl. He decided that he wanted a running start, and the founders could find no problem with this. Game-face on, McBride strode backwards, further and further, until he was out of sight.

A few hours later, he reappeared, running down the road towards them and kicking up the largest dust cloud in Albion's recorded history. Some who witnessed his run recall it being much like a mighty stampede, driven like an oncoming force of hurricanes that sought to obliterate everything in their unstoppable path of death and terror, a glorious coming of the apocalypse that signaled the awesome, magnificent sensation that was Chicken Kickin'. McBride's leg swung back, flew forth in a cataclysmic thunder of wind, and he missed the chicken by a mile. The most spectacular wipeout in Albion's recorded history followed, and the league founders spent the next hour pulling him out of the Sandgoose's wall.

Kathleen Korpulent was up next. Rather than kicking the chicken (which would have put her into the lead by default), she picked it up and began stroking its feathers, sputtering about how it was the cutest thing, until it mistook her nose for a worm and bit it. Not that many could tell the difference either. She broke league rules by throwing it, and as a result, was disqualified.

Speedy was third. When it was realized that he was going to stand there doing nothing until someone prodded him to play, Big Fat Joe grew indignant and began pressuring the horse to do so. His frustration eventually ended in him smacking the horse's hide, at which point Speedy chose to play Big Fat Joe's Face Kickin'. He was disqualified.

Bandit was last. It turned out that he'd gotten bored and gone into the Sandgoose too while the game carried on outside, and by the time they found him he was pissing-in-the-corner drunk out of his skull. The league founders spent a great deal of effort helping him stumble outside while he tried to remember his name. Upon being told it was his turn, Bandit grew enthusiastic, and walked into an adjacent pole.

They helped position him in front of the chicken and told him if he could kick it even half a millimeter, he would win. Bandit stood for a long period of time, regarding the chicken before him. Finally, after an agonizing minute of silence, he swung his foot back, threw it forward, and no one knows how but somehow it landed in the crotch of the guard standing ten feet away.

After paying five hundred gold to get Bandit out of jail, the founders studied their progress. Although not a completely catastrophic disaster, as far as disasters in the history of Albion were concerned, the first game was a semi-terrible disaster, perhaps a seven or seven-point-five on the Albion Disaster Scale. Eggington was furious with his athletes, accusing them of trying to sabotage the endeavor, until he realized Korpulent was the only one who knew what the word "sabotage" meant, and she was too dumb to know how to sabotage something anyway. Since Speedy and Bandit were the only ones who had actually kicked something, the first game was declared a tie in their favor, although neither of them actually won anything because they hadn't kicked any chickens.

The entourage picked up their things and moved on to Westcliff, to no one in Oakfield's notice. The trip there was even worse than the first. At one point during the journey, Korpulent accidentally set the chickens loose after swearing one of them had told her it was Skorm incarnate (Korpulent was purported to have certain mental disabilities), and this of course attracted a whole swarm of Balverines.

This time, the founders had had enough foresight to buy a few rifles in Oakfield, but they had failed to remember to purchase gunpowder and bullets, so they were resigned to trying to hit the Balverines with them instead. McBride and Bandit once again were the vanguard of the defense, and to their credit they fared much better in close-quarters combat than against the enemy outlaws earlier, but this time Korpulent tried to get into the mix. With just one look at her, the Balverines were horrified, and attacked with a fury unlike any before seen in documents thoroughly studying the behavior of Albion's dangerous creatures.

It didn't take long for the founders to panic when they saw their athletes getting knocked around, minus Speedy, who spent the battle eating grass. Stein was brave enough to light a torch and wave it around to try and distract the Balverines, but he only succeeded in setting Huffinpuff's nose hairs on fire. Big Fat Joe and Eggington thought it best to try and throw some of the chickens around, but Korpulent stepped on one and it began attacking her too.

It was around this time that McBride was said to have tried something. Supposedly, he had once heard that Balverines are repelled by the sight of a hero performing vulgar thrusting motions with his pelvis, and although he had never tested this theory against anything besides his own reflection in a mirror, he confidently decided that in the midst of this terrifying ordeal, with things quickly looking worse by the second, it was time to give it a try.

Upon bearing witness to the display, the Balverines quickly shifted the focus of their attack to him, which is why McBride walks kind of funny these days.

It wasn't until one of the Balverines accidentally ripped off Korpulent's top that the fighting jarred to an abrupt halt. The Balverines took one look at her again, screeched louder than any banshee could ever hope to manage, and tore off into the woods. The entourage celebrated joyously until it was realized that McBride and Bandit had screamed and run off too. Once they were found, and a solution to Korpulent's lack of top was attained (Big Fat Joe eventually parted with his big fat jacket), the trip to Westcliff continued uninterrupted.

When they reached Westcliff, the Crucible organizers objected to their presence. They implied that the ACKL was more or less moving into territory in which it wasn't welcome, and that business for the Crucible would suffer directly as part of the ACKL's presence, but Eggington wouldn't budge. Eventually an agreement was established: The ACKL could set up its game on the outskirts of town, a far enough distance from the Crucible where the two sides couldn't see, glare, or shout petty insults at each other.

The area where they were allowed to have the second game was a muck-filled swamp near a muck-filled waterfall sending muck-filled water into a muck-filled ditch. Green mold was growing everywhere the brown water didn't touch, and frequently thugs would wander by for the sole purpose of laughing at their misfortune. Eggington wasn't impressed, but he didn't have much choice if he didn't want to spark a riot.

After a full day of hyping the second game, it got underway before a considerably larger audience than the Oakfield efforts had seen. This made Eggington nervous, and before the game he asked his athletes to try and not flub everything up for him, in addition to praying to at least four separate heavenly figures for the same outcome. The athletes affirmed that everything would go as planned--the ones that could talk, anyway.

The order was the same as before. McBride was up first, and since he was still feeling the effects of the Balverine attack, was much more cautious in his kick attempt this time around. That didn't stop him from backing up for a good start again, and thirty minutes later he reappeared in the horizon, except this time his bull-like charge was reduced to a careful, meager jog, to everyone's disappointment. At least twelve witnesses describe the facepalm Eggington performed as "hilariously self-demeaning."

Moments before his foot was set to make contact with the chicken, McBride jolted to a stop and favored his leg. He quickly deduced that he had pulled a muscle, though in fact it was only a cramp, but regardless, he limped away from the chicken and approached Eggington to begin a discussion regarding injury compensation. Enraged, Eggington instructed McBride in no polite terms to get back out there and kick the chicken before the audience killed them all, but Korpulent, gushing over McBride and his somewhat pitiful injury, successfully offered to take his turn and let him rest.

Korpulent moved towards the chicken. Halfway there, it became apparent that she was sinking into the swamp. No one noticed at first, mainly because everyone had difficulty consciously looking at her for more than a second in the first place, but when she was having difficulty moving her arms, Eggington became concerned that her slight weight issues made it so she wouldn't be able to participate, not to mention the fact she was soon going to have difficulty breathing. Eggington recruited a few members of the crowd to help pull her out, but they failed to do so, and thus she was disqualified.

Big Fat Joe suggested they get on with the game, and Speedy was up next, but once again he did nothing but stand there. Already irritable as it was, given the success of the game thus far, Big Fat Joe smacked the horse on the hide, at which point Speedy again played Big Fat Joe's Face Kickin'. Speedy was disqualified.

By then McBride had left for a drink, so he was disqualified. As pathetic as it was, once again, Bandit would win by default if he could kick the chicken even half a millimeter, but he was nowhere to be found. A quick investigation revealed that he had curiously entered the Crucible "to see how well he could do," and had yet to come back out.

An extremely alarmed Eggington disqualified him immediately and ordered the rest of the athletes to get in there and get him the hell out, but considering the current conditions, that wasn't happening. McBride was distracted, trying to get Stein to have a drink with him, Korpulent was still stuck in the ground, and Speedy was delighting in the company of various women who were petting him and feeding him apples. Annoyed beyond all comprehension, Eggington entered the Crucible's audience areas to make sure the poor stupid fool hadn't gotten his head blown off.

Eggington was utterly flabbergasted at what he saw. Bandit had made it to the final fight of the Crucible, although for some reason he wasn't wearing any pants. He was putting up a fine effort against a rock troll and a host of hobbes, although he was prone to getting hit with those damned blue will balls the hobbe mages tend to shoot everywhere. Nevertheless, he was doing a civil service to bandits everywhere with his performance, despite otherwise being regarded by all as an incompetent imbecile.

Eggington cheered for the dumb boy while the rock troll's gargantuan hands shook the arena. The combat was chaotic and violent, and frequently confusing to the rock troll and its legion of hobbes since Bandit felt the need to yell "BOOM HEADSHOT" every time he shot his pistol (regardless of whether he struck an enemy or hit the wall behind them), but after a few near mishaps, the fight was almost over--in Bandit's favor. The rock troll was wound down and on its last legs, and Bandit readied himself for the kill. To Eggington's relief, the day was not a total loss after all.

Before the finishing strike could be made, McBride leapt into the arena, screaming like a lunatic and shouting about coming to Bandit's rescue. Apparently, to him, the best way to get rid of an injury was to get a few drinks into one's system. With a flashy spin that severely embarrassed everyone who saw it, he severed the rock troll's life with one blow, and that was how Bandit forever engraved his name into sports history by being disqualified from both an ACKL game and the Crucible in the same day.

Although his attempt to win the Crucible had failed, the men and women of Westcliff offered to buy drinks for Bandit and his "friends" that evening. He accepted, but McBride did too, and it didn't take long for the adventurer to start swinging his gusto around. After announcing jovially that he could single-handedly whoop everyone within the surrounding half-mile from there to Texas (people have yet to figure out where this place supposedly is), the entourage found itself being forced to leave Westcliff courtesy of the rather large angry mob chasing them. Big Fat Joe barely escaped with his big fat hat.

Eggington was not inclined to sit back and roll with the punches in this endless comedy of errors. He made it abundantly clear to his athletes that if they screwed up the final game as they had the first two, none of them would be back the next season. His statements were met with widespread apathy from everyone involved with the league, including those he had founded it with. He quickly understood that if the next game was not a success, there likely would be no more seasons following this one.

With the first two games behind them, the entourage headed back to Bowerstone, where Eggington hoped the league could redeem itself for its incredible failures thus far. Halfway there, the group realized they'd left Korpulent behind in the swamp, but this was met with widespread apathy too.

There was no red carpet awaiting them in Bowerstone. Most everyone who had been witness to Huffinpuff's obnoxious shouting had already forgotten the league existed, so some effort was spent in order to hype the final match. By this point, Eggington was just glad the past was behind them and they could concentrate on the final, but when the local guards once again reprimanded Huffinpuff for disturbing the peace and told him if he wanted to shout he should go do so at the Crucible, he began to wonder if Albion wasn't competent enough for any kind of organized sport that involved anything more sophisticated than people beating the holy hell out of each other.

The night before the final, the league tried to celebrate their progress with a round of drinks in the Cow & Corset Tavern. No one was in the mood to party, and it turned out the athletes had all gambled away their salaries on Crucible matches anyway, so no one actually had any drinks at all, but that didn't stop Bandit from making a racket while everyone tried to sleep. It was getting to the point where Eggington thought he was going to kill the young man himself if this kept up much longer, and he probably would have had the following day gone differently.

Because of Bandit's noise-making, McBride overslept the following morning. He was scheduled again to be the first kicker of the game, but when game-time arrived and he still wasn't present, Eggington asked Gaylord Stein to retrieve him. Stein declined for unknown reasons. Huffinpuff was sent instead.

Since the game was taking place in the middle of Bowerstone Market, it was inevitable that a large crowd would be attracted. This made Eggington even more nervous than before, and he knew the people would want to get their money's worth. Ten minutes after the scheduled first kick, though, McBride still hadn't arrived, and now Huffinpuff was absent too. Eggington's entire forehead was a curtain of sweat, much to the amusement of Big Fat Joe.

Not only that, but the Official Game Chicken had gone missing. It turned out Bandit had autographed it and given it to some kid, which infuriated Eggington, as he had stolen those chickens legally. He studied the crowd and looked for the child, and when he found him, he snatched the chicken straight out of the poor youngster's hands.

A symphony of gasps broke through the air. Appalled beyond belief by the noble's behavior, the guards immediately apprehended Eggington and placed him under arrest. Eggington was completely floored by this, and he put up a rather pitiful struggle that included him breaking his pinky and the guards laughing about it. Most witnesses agreed it was one of the more pathetic things they'd seen in their lifetimes.

Only then did McBride show up, and he instantly realized that the game was underway, or it was supposed to be. He was still a bit tired, however, and in his disheveled, sleepy-headed state, he failed completely to notice that the child was picking his chicken back up off the ground. For a moment, the Albion Chicken Kickin' League became the Albion Child Kickin' League, and the guards had him under arrest too by the time the unfortunate juvenile landed in the Bowerstone River.

Around this time, Bandit was standing and watching the events unfold while the crowd hooted and hollered. No one really knows why he did what he did, but most agree that it was simply because he wanted in on the criminal activity as well, and because he was a bona fide psycho-bitch. He hauled a nearby torch off its pole and promptly set an adjacent alcohol stall ablaze, except he didn't seem to know that not only was alcohol flammable, a great deal of Albion's lower-quality alcohol was made utilizing parts of hobbes that were extremely combustible, and thus he not only lost half his hearing due to the initial explosion but he also burned down half of Bowerstone Market.

When the town had gotten the fire out two days later, the guards tracked Bandit down, and after a short swordfight that somehow ended up with him not wearing any pants again, he too was placed under arrest and thrown into the local Bowerstone jail to rot for the next one or ten years with Eggington and McBride.

Since Speedy was the only one who was actually still physically capable of kicking a chicken, Stein, Huffinpuff, and Big Fat Joe were forced to declare him the winner of the ACKL's inaugural season. The three remaining founders divided what little gold intake there had been from the tour amongst themselves, with only Gaylord Stein considering offering some of it towards Eggington's, McBride's, and Bandit's massive bail fee (he eventually decided otherwise and spent the money on prostitutes in Bloodstone instead).

The three wouldn't get out of jail until long after the Market had been rebuilt. The guards left Bandit in for a considerably longer amount of time, simply because he was that messed up, but he too was eventually released after they were sick of feeling sorry for him.

Upon being released, Eggington quickly returned to being a stuffy, arrogant noble and spent the rest of his life trying to repress his memories of the ACKL and pretending to not know what it was when people asked him about it. Griff McBride continued adventuring until he lost a leg in a fight with a drunken bard, after which he became a shockingly successful novelist, authoring shockingly terrible novels under the pseudonym of Meredith Sock. Speedy returned to his duties as Bowerstone's carriage service horse, only frequently being forced to put up with "aren't you that guy who won the ACKL?" questions. Bandit continued to unconvincingly act like he was a competent bandit, but after a purported run-in with a "chupacabra," he joined the Bowerstone guards and set out to help bring peace to the town, although he refused to take off his bandit mask for some reason (bandits--they're proud of themselves). As for Korpulent, they built a house over her, which might explain that strange bump in the floor of that one building in Westcliff.

The ACKL serves as a fine example of why most are in agreement with Edward Eggington in that Albion isn't ready for any kind of organized sport that doesn't involve other people getting killed in various disgusting, fun ways. Considering the gross inability of all involved to successfully kick a chicken even once, it is also considered to stand as a fine example of the average Albion native's incredible incompetence and stupidity. For this reason, most in Albion tend to shy away from any knowledge of it, though "The True Story of the ACKL" was a runaway hit among critics of modern Albion society--at least until they got bored of it and went to watch fights in the Crucible instead.


End file.
